Costs

Room, you will be provided a room during the New Faculty Conferences to share with a participant of the same gender. We will try and accommodate requests for private rooms, but you will need to pay for half the room charges.

All meals and snacks during the New Faculty Conferences will be provided on conference days, you will need to pay for meals on travel days. National Science Grants due not allow funds to be spent on alcoholic beverages.

All workshop materials will be provided free of charge. Many participants find it useful to bring their own laptop computers, but this is not a requirement.

The online discussion board accounts will be provided free of charge.

* There will be no registration fee for this experience.

Participant costs

Home institutions are expected to cover one half of the travel expenses for participants to get to the two conferences. This includes airfare and meals on travel days. Scholarships will be available for participants whose home institution cannot use funds for out-of-state travel.

The second conference will take place as a tandem meeting to the AAPT national summer meeting. As you are already there, we would highly encourage participants to stay an extra three days to participate in the national meeting. If you elect to stay, you or your home institution would need to cover the associated cost of staying which would include registration fee for the national meeting and the room and board for the extra days.

Graduate credits for participating in this New Faculty Experience are available. If you wish to receive these credits, you will be responsible for paying the tuition. This will be optional.

Why you should join in on the Experience:

This Experience is designed to equip new faculty members with knowledge of active learning techniques that are both based on Physics Education Research (PER) and that have been successfully implemented at two-year colleges across the country. Led by experienced two-year college physics instructors, this conference will empower a new faculty member as they embark on the important mission of developing critical thinking skills in their students and developing the future technological workforce for this country.

This Experience will focus on Physics Education Research and the data that show traditional lecture-based physics classes result in relatively small gains in student conceptual understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics. Much of this will take place through an online discussion of journal articles related to the topic during June and July. Consequently, conference participants will be ready for the actual conference as they will understand why there is a need to engage students at a higher cognitive level.

This Experience exposes participants to three major pedagogical initiatives in introductory physics that have improved student comprehension: Microcomputer-Based Labs (MBL), Introductory College Physics/Twenty First Century (ICP/21), and Instructional Strategies in Introductory Physics (discourse management/TIPERS). Based on their exposure the first day, participants will choose two of these areas to further explore over the next two days.